Forget hustling. This book will disrupt your deeply held beliefs about work, success, and, indeed, life.
If you’re the average person in the developed world, you spend 70 percent of your waking hours at work. And if you’re the average person, you’re miserable for most of those hours. This is simply not an acceptable state of affairs for your one shot at life. No matter your station, you possess incredible unique powers. It’s a modern myth that hard work and hustle are the paths to success. Inside you is a soul. And once you unleash it fully into the domain of work, magic happens. Awakening the Buddha and the Badass inside you is a process that will disrupt the way you work altogether. You’ll gain access to tools that bend the very rules of reality.
• The Buddha is the archetype of the spiritual master. The person who can live in this world but also move with an ease, grace, and flow that comes from inner awareness and alignment. • The Badass is the archetype of the changemaker. This is the person who is out there creating change, building, coding, writing, inventing, leading. The badass represents the benevolent disruptor—the person challenging the norms so we can be better as a species.
Once you integrate the skill sets of both archetypes, you will experience life at a different level from most people. You will operate from a space of bliss, ease, inspiration, and abundance. The Buddha and the Badass: The Secret Spiritual Art of Succeeding at Work will show you how. Author of the New York Times bestseller The Code of the Extraordinary Mind and founder of Mindvalley, Vishen Lakhiani has turned his own life and company into his research lab. He’s codified everything he’s learned into the how-to steps in this book. The Buddha and the Badass teaches you how to master your work and your life.
Vishen is an author and entrepreneur in the ed-tech space. He is the founder and CEO of Mindvalley, an education technology company specialising in learning experience design.
Mindvalley creates tech and platforms that power online academies in areas that traditional education ignores. These include mindfulness, personal growth, wellness, spirituality and more. Mindvalley employs 200 people and has 500,000 students globally.
Vishen is also one of the world's leading experts on company culture and has won numerous awards for workspace design In addition to founder of Mindvalley, he is the founder of the transformational festival A-Fest, the popular meditation app, Omvana, and the author of "The Code of the Extraordinary Mind."
Vishen quest is to help move humanity to a more holistic, integrated education system that caters for the whole being.
Nothing it pretends to be. Repetitive. Trite. Mostly an advertisement for his online stuff. Not a hint of the “spirituality” it claims to embrace. Skip it.
I have no intention of finishing this book for the same reasons everyone else gave it one star; the author is an arrogant Silicon Valley wannabe life coach who offers no real insight into anything. Skip this and read No Nonsense Buddhism for Beginners...you'll get more out of it.
The bad: My biggest criticism of this book is both its lack of originality and its unnecessary pretentiousness. The author rehashes a mix of basic Tony Robbins exercises from 15 years ago mixed with basic startup management and changes the wording to make it seem like he invented something new. I have zero tolerance to this type of bullshit.
This claims to be a book about mindfulness. It's, instead, a series of hidden advertisements and callbacks to Mindvalley and their products. Unlike other reviewers with negative comments, I don't have a problem with the excessively positive, "woo woo" stuff. It's a niche. I do have a problem with people taking fucking advantage of other people and tricking them, though. And this fits the bill 100%. If the author considers this acceptable, I can only think of how this person runs their company.
To give you an example. The first chapter is fully focused on a basic value definition exercise. And the author mentions things like "if you work in a company, the values are not the same as your personal ones" as if it's a pearl of wisdom. The author seems delusional enough to not realize he is reciting basic startup and personal development knowledge that one can find anywhere. I am appalled.
The author name drops like there's no tomorrow, claiming to understand Victor Frankl's pain because he was forced to leave the US (in certain passages be says he left voluntarily - this is inconsistent). We also get quotes and references including Simon Sinek, Steve Jobs at his Stanford commencement speech, and other generic inclusions.
The good: If the author really did bootstrap his startup to a centimillion-dollar valuation with no VC, hats off. But I'm sorry, it still doesn't make this a good book. Not by a long shot.
Verdict: In my opinion, this book embodies the worst of "mindfulness vaporware" with startup self-aggrandizing. Buy an old Eckhart Tolle book and watch a free Stanford CS YouTube class and you will be so much better served for the same price.
Whichever ghostwriter redacted this for the author owes them a full refund.
I think the reason people hated this book was because of their expectation. I'll say this straight up this book doesn't have to do with Buddhism or learning Buddhist practices. It is not spiritual, it's psychological. It's more a mishmash of Vishens learnings of feelings, emotions, cultural acceptance of feelings, what the norm is, how to express yourself, self awareness, how to grow a company that has a great open, trusting and vulnerable culture. It took me almost to the half way point for me to actually shake off the expectation of the book and to just enjoy it for what it was, a self help personal development book. Vishen has been around huge leaders like Bill Gates and Richard Branson and he's picked up on some interesting things. this first half of the book almost all I really got was - you create your own destiny and identity and you can be whomever you want to be. Just focus on attaining your future self. Near the end of the book he builds on this by saying - Self affirmations most of the time don't work, you have to question it like - how am I sexy, how am I more productive than yesterday - kind of mixing affirmations with gratitude. It was interesting how Vishen use to work for Bill Gates and had a BBQ at his home lol flippin' burgers. He drives home the point that the strict traditional professionalism that a workplace has is now old fashioned. There should be trust and connection with each other at the work force, it's win/win for the employee and the employer.
I started reading this book as an open minded skeptic because while I do think Vishen has a lot to offer and yet a lot of the times his concepts can get too abstract so that you aren't actually able to execute on them. With that said, Vishen totally blew me away with this book, it is a business book through and through even though in the beginning Vishen says it isn't. All chapters include exercises and Vishen has backed up his unusual business philosophies with scientific evidence whenever possible. All in all, I was pleasantly surprised that unlike what I thought, this book wasn't filled with abstract spiritual jargon but instead is a practical manual for how business and personal development can go hand in hand
I truly resonate with the key concepts of this book and it's a gem: full of stories, practical examples and exercises.
In particular I loved the sections about clarity of vision and upgrading identity. I had a proof of its value time and time again and I wish more people new about it. I recommend this book in this sense because Vishen has a masterful way of communicating and also guiding readers (and listeners of his videos and his Mindvalley programs) to applying these principles in their lives.
Moreover, this book is full of stories, examples, references to books, authors and world class performers that Vishen has worked with, so it's also a great source of recommendations to continue your growth journey (Mindvalley programs).
I am a occasional reader of personal development books, and I always feel inspired by them. However, it is not always easy to connect with them.
I think thats the most important thung, the connection. Personal growth is nice to read about, but translating it into action often is tricky. For me this book felt really down to earth and therefore i really connected with Vishen. For me he feels like the CEO where I can have awesome discussion with about talent management and entrepeneurship.
This brings me to the second point why I gave it 5 stars. My passion is talent management. How can we get the most out of human beings, and especially at the work place. I often find that big companies are still not enough focused on developing there employees. This book, with all the nice training and excercises, give a hand to the big companies on these practices, and how to get the most out of you human capital. Therefore I hope that every CEO / HR manager / everyone reads this book so we can transform work places disruptively
If you work at or are interviewing for a job at Mind Valley, this should be required reading. For the rest of us, I'd say it will be hard to implement his advice when you work in corporate America and they literally could care less what you think.
I was too stubborn to put it down when I should have just moved on. It feels extremely Sales-pitchy and surface-level all throughout and I kept waiting for it to get better: it did not. It was a mediocre self-development book that might help teenagers.
Do yourself a favor, skip this BS book. ------------------------------ The author clearly reminds me of the schoolboys who don't know the answer to an exam question but end up writing pages and pages of irrelevant repeated stuff just to fill the pages. Now I very well know how this guy made his money, write pages upon pages of repetitive bs, drop names like Richard Branson or Viktor Frankl here and there, show off a lot (all gas and no substance). Now picture this torture: He starts with a summary of all chapters. Then he begins Chapter 1 with a summary of Chapter 1. Towards the end he fills up stuff about subsequent chapter and so on.. now you get it right? Well, I've warned you enough. There was no way I could return this book and get a refund. So there you go, I contributed some money to this guy for nothing :(
This book explores personal growth, spiritual development, and achieving high performance. It can be a valuable read for anyone seeking a more fulfilling life or just looking to improve their mindset.
Keep in mind, that self-help books are a personal journey. Don't set too high expectations, and be open to the unique insights it may offer.
I had greatly liked Vishen's firt book, "The Code of the Extraordinary Mind", and I was honestly a bit disappointed by this follow-up. It feels half-baked and rushed, with a repetition of the main ideas exposed in his first book. I really value Vishen's approach to business and life, and have derived a lot of great ideas from his thoughts, but this is not his best work. I couldn't help but think it felt more like a PR endeavor for his company than a new addition to his body of work.
Another great and inspiring book from Vishen! I've been following Mindvalley for a quite some time and by reading this book, I got to know even more on how Vishen shapes the company culture and transforms it to massive growth, which is very insightful and admirable. I enjoy reading each of the chapter and most of the knowledge applies for entrepreneurs, leaders and individuals. It even outlines a good framework on how one should think about the career and vision of life. We all have both the Buddha and the Badass in ourselves, and it is our challenge to couple them together and have us operate on both modes to succeed in work and life.
Again Vishen wrote a great book! Great ideas, great insights and very good examples. So you can better understand and grasp what he is saying. Really enjoyed it. A book that you can re-read definitely again!
"Sometimes you have to destroy a part of your life that is merely good, to allow what is truly great to enter." = Beautiful Destruction - by Vishen Lakhiani
💡 Top 3 Lessons learned
📑 Even though I read this book without running my own business (yet) I found it insightful on how to enhance the work performance of individuals but also as a group. There is this idea of being successful at work being the outcome of hard individual work. Lakhiani, the author instead gives examples of how the performance of a company is highly dependend on trust and respect between co-workers.
📑I think in the time we live in today despite of social media and everything, the harshest criticism we get from ourselves. Social media etc. puts these pictures in our head.. the right way to dress, what to eat, what a body should look like. Let me phrase it differently: We decide that these images affect the appreciation towards ourselves. Lakhiani has some exercises he listed to practice self-love.
📑 Positive Optimism: This is something that kept me going when experiencing for example failures in school. When I felt sad or just exhausted one thought kept me going: These kind of feeling in their way teach me something and are temporary. They will lead me to a happy state. With that comes appreciation.
🧘 conclusion: read it when you want to know how to "succeed" in a work environment not as an individual but as part of a team. But also read it when you want to work on your "unfuckwithability" that is a result of self-love practises but also a healthy mindset.
This isn’t as good as his first book. More then 50% of the book talks about his first book. 15% is of the author encouraging you to buy his first book.
I strongly recommend reading his first book the code of the extraordinary mind. This book is disappointing following the first.
There are two worlds we all live in: 1. There is our outer world, which is shared with other humans. This is the world of jobs, careers, culture, rituals, and shared meaning with others. We place so much emphasis on regimenting and ordering this outside world. We have laws, rules, structures, and processes to govern our lives. 2. We also have an inner world. This is the world inside our own heads. It’s our hopes, fears, aspirations, dreams,daily cascade of emotions. It consists of every doubt, every hope, every brazen thought, every secret desire or aspiration. And this world for most people is completely unstructured, messy, and disorganized.
My first audible book. An because this book talks about disrupters, I think this book was a very good choice to start my audible journey. So, we have both Buddha and the Badass in this book. Buddha is the spiritual master and the second one is the benevolent disrupter. To become a true master of life, you need to integrate the skillsets of the both. Some quotes/notes from the book, - Instead of happiness, aim for positive optimism - Being unf**kwithable – the realisation that you are enough as you are - Success and failures are not important. What is important is that you grow and evolve, you remove all the barriers that are holding you back from self-actualisation.
Was nice to see that some leaders actually think on a bigger and better level about serving the world itself, not just doing it for the money! True purpose reveal! Digestable book, fast read, valuable information.
Loved it a lot with its short examples. If you plan to have a company this could be somewhat eye opener self help book, in case u are just starting your journey.
Nuestra vida se compone de diferentes dimensiones, llevar con equilibrio cada una en los diferentes aspectos de nuestra vida requiere un trabajo personal. Resueno con la visión integral de Vishen al momento de brindar herramientas para el trabajo en nuestro día a día sin sacrificar nuestra esencia.
I read the first few pages of this book and couldn't connect with the writer's style and approach. It seemed more like an ad for his business than a real book with a scientific approach towards a topic. He tries so hard to say he's a super successful person and got it all figured out and the reader must listen to his preaching. I simply decided to skip this one!